Details: If you've poked around a LEGO store or LEGO Shop-at-Home recently, you may have seen the 2011 calendar they currently have for sale. To a seasoned LEGO fan, most of the images on the front of the calendar look familiar - they're largely recent kits, recent promotional items, and recent collectible minifigures. There's also a spiffy-looking red car with more chrome elements than we've seen in a set in the past few years. Where did that car come from?

The answer is that it's based on this earlier model by misterzumbi. Occasionally, when a builder from the AFOL (Adult Fan Of LEGO) community is hired by the LEGO company to design kits, you'll see some of their older models reflected in the projects they work on for the LEGO company. This is clearly one such case. The design appears to have been simplified for the calendar - perhaps to reduce the amount of connections that the LEGO company does not consider to be firm enough to use, or to make it easier for kids to build. Yes, I am absolutely trying to start rumors about them trying to make this a kit, because I know I'd buy (at least) one. It's difficult to get details in a car this size that make it clearly a particular make or model, and this one is an astounding success, using offsets of various fractions of a stud alongside studs-not-on-top trickery. Even the updated version looks great, even if it is a bit dialed back.

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